Doune of Relugas

The Doune of Relugas is a hill fort nine kilometres south-west of Forres in Moray. It stands on a rocky knoll about forty metres above the valley where the River Findhorn meets the River Divie. The knoll forms the south-east tip of a promontory that overlooks the Findhorn valley and reaches as far as Culbin Sands on the Moray Firth nine miles away. The site gives a clear view along the valley in every direction. The fort was built and used from the first millennium BC until the end of the first millennium AD. Inside a timber-laced rampart is an oval enclosure fifty-three metres long and thirty-three metres wide, with an entrance gap on the east side. To the north and west a curved ditch five and a half metres wide and two metres deep runs across the promontory, backed by an earthen rampart one and a half metres high. Blocks of stone from the rampart show signs of having been heated until they partly melted, a process called vitrification. Similar vitrified forts nearby include Dun Evan, Dun Finlay and Dun Davie. In the 19th century the ruins were reshaped as part of the designed landscape of the Relugas estate by the antiquarian Thomas Dick Lauder.